I think one of the most useful terms coined in the past few years has been Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness.”

[T]ruthiness is a “truth” that a person claims to know intuitively “from the gut” without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.

McClatchy Newspapers – the folks who got the Iraq WMD story right before the war – has an article about “conservative” attempts at a rewrite of history, facts be damned, apparently. (I put “conservative” in quotes, because this is a subset of people on the right wing, politically, which tends to tarnish the group as a whole but does not speak for the group because the “Right” and “Conservatives” aren’t monolithic.)

Among other things, Alexander Hamilton who was darn near a monarchist, is described as a small government conservative by Dick Armey. Armey also describes Jamestown as a socialist, doomed to failure, never mind that it was a capitalist venture financed by the Virginia Company of London — a joint stock corporation — to make a profit.

To the reliably insane snake-oil salesman, Glenn Beck, Teddy Roosevelt is evidence of a socialist cancer in America which must be eradicated and not tolerated. Beck finds deeply offensive Roosevelt’s notion that fortunes ought to be honorably obtained and well used. Beck, predictably, doesn’t care that Roosevelt explicitly rejected Marx and did not advocate government ownership of the means of production.

Minnesota wingnut, Michelle Bachmann charges FDR with responsibility for the 90% loss in stocks that took place before he took office and with tariff legislation passed by a Republican Congress and signed by Herbert Hoover before FDR took office.

Facts are irrelevant. They have “deeper truths” on their side.

I’m pretty hard on Southerners for their failed attempts at treason in defense of their right to own their fellow human beings. But really, I suppose, I’m not mad at the southern soldiers. Sure, they were horribly misguided in their loyalties, but by and large they were fighting because of their loyalty which has a certain nobility. When you’re down in the muck, it’s awfully tough to see much past “us” versus “them.”

What I really can’t tolerate are modern day people, far removed from the time and place of the Confederacy who, even in hindsight, think taking up arms against the United States of America in order to preserve slavery was a worthwhile or even honorable thing to do. That such sentiment exists, strongly in some areas, is beyond question. See Tony Horwitz’s “Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War.”

More recently, we were treated to the amazing spectacle of a United States Congressman on the floor of the House of Representatives referring to the Civil War as the “Great War of Yankee Aggression.” Specifically, I am referring to Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA):

BROUN: If ObamaCare passes, that free insurance card that’s in people’s pockets is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the War Between The States — the Great War of Yankee Aggression.

You don’t like health care reform? Fine, vote against it. Even argue that it’s a bad idea. But romanticizing the Civil War and the rebels who took up arms against the U.S. is beyond the pale. To borrow from Samuel Johnson: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

Sometimes, I think Reconstruction was ended too early. The South never fully internalized that they were beaten and they were wrong. I’m reminded of Cool Hand Luke:

Luke: Don’t hit me anymore…Oh God, I pray to God you don’t hit me anymore. I’ll do anything you say, but I can’t take anymore.

Boss Paul: You got your mind right, Luke?

Luke: Yeah. I got it right. I got it right, boss. (He grips the ankles of the guard)

Boss Paul: Suppose you’s back-slide on us?

Luke: Oh no I won’t. I won’t, boss.

Boss Paul: Suppose you’s to back-sass?

Luke: No I won’t. I won’t. I got my mind right.

Boss Paul: You try to run again, we gonna kill ya.

Luke: I won’t, I won’t, boss.

The South never quite got it’s mind right about the Civil War.

Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.

I don’t know how bad it really is, but this article about the Texas State School Board’s decision to modify the history curriculum to reflect a more conservative-friendly vision of the past brought to mind Orwell’s quote.

The curriculum will now, apparently:

#Cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century.

#Revise silly notions about the separation of Church & State.

#Emphasize the conservative resurgence of the 80s and 90s.

#Emphasize Black Panther violence as part of the Civil Rights movement and Republican votes in favor of Civil Rights legislation.

#Require studying “unintended consequences of Great Society and affirmative action legislation.

#Rehabilitate Joseph McCarthy.

#Not require teaching that “the founding fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring the government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion above all others.”

#Replace references to ‘capitalism’ with ‘free-enterprise system.’

#Add Milton Friedman to economists who should be studied along side Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes.

In a stunning display of I’m not sure what, an Iowa state legislator has introduced a bill that would essentially eliminate the common law.

It would forbid a judge from using case law or judicial precedent as a basis for his or her rulings. The only permissible legal authority would be the U.S. Constitution, the Iowa Constitution, the Code of Iowa, the Federalist Papers, and ” other writings of the founding fathers.” And, for good measure, the bill provides that it is not reviewable by a court.

Holy wingnuttery, Batman.

Indianapolis Public Schools seems to be itching for a lawsuit based on its Internet policy (pdf) (via Dispatches from the Culture Wars and a number of other sites). The Freedom from Religion Foundation is calling them on it. The policy includes in the list of blocked categories:

Alternative Spirituality/Belief – Sites that promote and provide information on religions such as Wicca, Witchcraft or Satanism. Occult practices, atheistic views, vodoo rituals or any form of mysticism are represented here. Includes sites that endorse or offer methods, means of instruction, or other resources to affect or influence real events through the use of spells, incantations, curses and magic powers. This category includes sites which discuss or deal with paranormal or unexplained events.

(emphasis added). There’s enough wrong with this that I’m not sure where to start. First, why should some religions be preferred over others? And why should non-religion be lumped together with “alternative” religion?

Web-filtering for schools is a tough business, particularly if you have a bunch of parents with widely differing agendas breathing down your neck, but this one strikes me as gratuitous. Ed Brayton has this to say:

What a bizarre amalgamation of unrelated things that is. What in the world is atheism doing lumped together with witchcraft in the first place? It’s not as if atheists believe in witchcraft any more than they do in Christianity. Oh, that’s right – to the fundamentalist mind, there is no distinction; anything non-Christian is evil and all in exactly the same way. And of course, praying to God to affect or influence real events is totally different from casting a spell or sprinkling chicken blood on the ground.

Fred Clark at Slacktivist has an ongoing series about Tim LaHaye’s “Left Behind” series. The latest installment has a digression into the comfort of social conservatives with the idea of a dictator in the mold of Cincinnatus. The short version of the Cincinnatus story is that he was a Roman general who had retired to his farm. When enemies threatened Rome, he reluctantly accepted the position of dictator, beat the enemy, and returned to the farm.

Clark drops a footnote that I found interesting:

[The notion that the ideal leader is a virtuous dictator] is another division distinguishing the social-conservative wing of the Republican Party from its libertarian, free-market faction. The myth of Cincinnatus illustrates social conservatives’ comfort with unchecked power and unlimited authority. That contradicts the Madisonian concern for limited government that’s central to conservatives of a more libertarian bent.

It also helps to explain why the partisan hypocrisy often demonstrated by this kind of social conservative isn’t only partisan hypocrisy. President George W. Bush was, in their view, a virtuous man with Jesus in his heart. That virtue, they believed, was sufficient as a check and balance against any potential misuse of power. President Barack Obama, they believe, is an evil man and therefore must not be trusted with even the constitutionally constrained, limited, checked-and-balanced power of his office. This is why former Vice President Dick Cheney belongs with the social conservatives even though he was, at best, unenthusiastic about their dual obsessions of criminalizing abortion and homosexuality. Cheney believes that virtue and virtue alone is a sufficient constraint on the use of power, and that power ought to be wielded unfettered by any other limit in pursuit of that virtue.

The group of people who think that Barack Obama is not simply wrong, but evil is not as fringe as I would like them to be. Commenter here, “T,” shared with me an exchange he had with a friend-of-a-friend on Facebook who was convinced that Obama was using FEMA to stockpile coffins in preparation for concentration camps. The guy was citing Apocalyptic Bible passages as “supporting authority.” (I liked the responding question about why in the hell an evildoer bent on mass murder would trifle with coffins – departing from the normal tradition of simply dumping the bodies in a hole after mass slaughter.)

Anyway, the idea that a certain group of people sees a virtuous dictator as the preferred model of governance explains some of the schizophrenia when power shifts from one party to another. Suddenly Black Helicopters and the New World Order are a going concern again.